By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, June 19 -- With UN Peacekeeping on the verge of incorporating a listed child soldier recruiter, Chad, into its mission in Mali on July 1, on Wednesday two non-governmental organizations came out against it: WorldVision and WatchList on Children and Armed Conflict.
This resulted in the UN at the noon briefing finally answering in some detail the questions Inner City Press has been asking since early June, about Herve Ladsous of UN Peacekeeping allowing a "grace period."
It is just this Ladsous grace period that WatchList on Children and Armed Conflict calls a "harmful, precedent setting action that, in addition to issues of credibility, could undermine efforts to demobilize children."
WatchList's report also says that "by mid-April 2013, there were reports that Chadian troops fighting with French forces in Kidal and other parts of Mali were, in a few cases, detaining and questioning children over three weeks before handing them over to French forces."
Inner City Press at Wednesday's noon briefing asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's deputy spokesman Eduardo Del Buey if DPKO was aware of this, and when it was going to tell the public. Del Buey said he will asked DPKO; we will be waiting.
DPKO being headed by its fourth Frenchman in a row, Ladsous, while the allegation involves detentions by Chad "with French forces" raises again the issue of conflict of interest for Ladsous, a French diplomat who represented his country at the UN during the 1994 Rwanda genocide (and argued for the escape of the genocidaires into Eastern Congo).
The European Union's genial deputy head of delegation Ioannis Vrailis was also on the panel with the NGOs. Inner City Press asked him for the EU's position on the incorporation of a listed child soldier recruiter into a UN Peacekeeping mission by Ladsous.
Vrailis used the word "scourge," but then seemed to support the very grace period the NGOs it calls experts say is a "harmful, precedent setting action that, in addition to issues of credibility, could undermine efforts to demobilize children." In the name of convenience... Or solidarity with a European Under Secretary General like Ladsous? Watch this site.
